Islamic Diversity Challenges Popular Perceptions

Kate McCarthy and Joel Zimbelman, Religious Studies

Popular American perception might hear irony in that translation, so
accustomed we have become to hearing Muslim and Islamic
as modifiers for terrorism and fundamentalism.
As an academic community, it is our responsibility to question and complicate
these associations, in a time when anguish and fear propel so many of
us to dangerous oversimplifications.

There are more than one billion Muslims worldwide, roughly one out of
every six people living on the planet. Muslims live on every continent
save Antarctica, speak countless different languages, and have skin of
every human shade. Beyond the major denominational distinction
between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, who make up 85 percent and 15 percent
of the Muslim population respectively, is the overwhelming cultural diversity
that has resulted from 1,400 years of global Muslim expansion. In Indonesia,
for example, 88 percent of the population of 180 million practices Islam,
in ways that reflect very little of Arab culture and very much of the
regions indigenous and Hindu traditions. Indeed, only about 18 percent
of the worlds Muslims live in Arab states.

Muslims are united by a simple creed (There is no God but God,
and Mohammed is the Prophet of God); the practices of daily prayer,
charity, and annual fasting during the month of Ramadan; and, for those
who are able, pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca where Islam was first
established.

Theologically, there is more that unites than divides Muslims, Jews,
and Christians, who share a common scriptural tradition and trace their
roots to common ancestors. At a time when Islam has been made notorious
for acts of terrorist and often-suicidal holy war, it is important
to remember that none of these three religious traditions is univocally
pacifist. The holy books of Muslims, Jews, and Christians have all served
to valorize savage crusades and just wars, and all three traditions
have been claimed by individuals who have abandoned the distinction between
political adversaries and innocent civilians. Christians, in particular,
must face intense self-examination when they recall that Timothy McVeigh
believed he acted for the God of Jesus Christ.

It must also be noted that while it, like the Bible, has been enlisted
in the service of terrorism, the Quran, the sacred text of Islam,
also shares with the scriptures of Jews and Christians powerful prohibitions
against the slaughter of innocents and profound admonitions against hatred
and injustice. Two short passages from the Quran are representative of
its overarching message of human brotherhood, reconciliation, and peace:

O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of
a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may
know each other ...

(al Hujurat 49:13)

never let your hatred of people who would bar you
from the Inviolable House of Worship [the mosque in Mecca] lead you into
the sin of aggression; but rather help one another in furthering virtue
and God-consciousness, and do not help one another in furthering evil
and enmity ...

(al Maidah 5:4)

In spite of these observations, how can we account for the
fact that many millions of Muslims, from Kabul to Islamabad, Tehran, Cairo,
Ramallah, and the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, have exhibited
less than heartfelt sympathy for the United States during these tragic
days? For some Muslims, this attitude is an outgrowth of decades, if not
centuries, of perceived economic, political, and cultural aggression and
domination by the U.S.-led West.

But other forces are at work as well. Rather than linking
Islam with terrorism or with Arab ethnicity, or even with particular political
situations, it is more useful to explore the complex phenomenon of fundamentalism
as it has emerged in a variety of religious and ethnic contexts. The kind
of extreme traditionalism associated with fundamentalism is best understood
as an effort to define and defend personal and community identity in social
and political contexts in which such identity is felt to be lost or threatened.
Among terroristsTimothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden alikethe
highly charged language of religion becomes a powerful tool in the struggle
against a world that seems to have turned against them.

Instead of focusing on the religion of Islam, then, an effective
response to terrorism requires analyses of these underlying dynamics as
much as identifying individual perpetrators.

In these past difficult days, Muslims have spoken out from
around the world in united expressions of agony and sorrow over the terrorist
attacks on September 11. Their voices, not those of the terrorists, are,
we believe, most resonance with the rich texts and traditions of Islam.